Continued from Stories Inside! Part I
The front cover of my memoir provides suggestiveness and mood. There’s no story there. But all the elements of the front cover suggest that stories are inside on these pages—
“You shoppers who like stories, pick this book up!”
Here are some of those elements. The typewriter typeface, that helps. The paper on which the title is written is faded and wrinkled, sepia colored (with some acid-based aging along the edges of the paper—this manuscript and … Read More

Birthday number 100. Dad was pleased. Lots of people came to see him.
I thought, I’d better write down my life with him now—how it was. Before we forget.
Tyndale House Publishers bought what I wrote, and its editors made a book of my writing, a memoir. We needed a title. They found a good one. The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told—eye catching. Everyone was happy.
We needed a cover design. I had no ideas. I’m a word guy, not a design … Read More

For this week’s post, we’re interviewing Stephanie Rische, senior editor of nonfiction books at Tyndale House Publishers and blogger at stephanierische.com. She has edited a wide variety of memoirs in her twelve years at Tyndale—by authors ranging from NFL quarterbacks to mountain climbers, bloggers to basketball players, coaches to cancer survivors. Today she talks about memoir as a genre and why it has such a draw for readers.
Why are memoirs increasing in popularity?
In recent … Read More

Continued from Scene Two...
Scene Three
“Yes, you do have those pages. Now cut every sentence from the thousand pages that is not about the point.”
“What if I love those sentences now?”
“You will. But your love is self-indulgent. You’re in love with your love of your sentences. Cut anyway.”
“Not easy.”
“In the Caribbean, did you ever take on board a huge bunch of green bananas and hang them in the rigging and, when they ripened, need to eat them as fast as you possibly … Read More

Continued from Scene One...
Scene Two
“I don’t understand. Why do I do this then?”
“What someone wants to read is what that person needs to read.”
“How am I supposed to know what that person needs to read?”
“One thing everyone needs to read is the truth.”
“The truth about what?”
“About you, and about the point.”
“But the truth about me is what I wrote down already.”
“No, it isn’t. What you wrote down is a sequence of events, which you have ordered so they flow. That’s … Read More

One man could sail around the world and not hold a single reader with his memoir. E.B. White could describe a row across Central Park Lake and hold a reader breathless.
It’s not the events of your story. It’s the story of your events—in you.
Scene One
Location: a party at a house by the harbor.
The conversation: it might go something like this.
One of the men turns to me—about my age, getting grey—we’ve been chatting boats. “You’re the one who’s just published that … Read More

about Memoir Addict

You're here because you love stories. You've come to the right place. We find ordinary people with extraordinary stories. We will feature stories that will make you laugh, might make you cry, but all will definitely make you think and get inspired.

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